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Ceres station.

Earth’s “second moon” had now become part of the planet’s skyline for everyone on the right side of the planet. All of what used to be Asia, half of Russia, Australia, New Zealand, and all the way to the American Midwest, people could simply look up at any hour of the day and see the enormous dwarf planet hovering in the sky.

It had become quite a tourist attraction as well, as people flocked to those former countries to see the spectacle, or to Eden, where tour groups gathered to go up and personally walk around the parts of the station where construction had been completed.

The only difference was the cost—touring the station itself, at least in reality, was much more expensive than simply flying to a part of the world where one could see it from the ground. Roswell, New Mexico, in particular, had become a tourist mecca, as had Sedona, Arizona, oddly enough. Roswell was understandable, as they had always had a space tourism theme, but Sedona was historically home to hippies and neopagans—both old and new—so nobody quite understood the draw there.

But regardless of the high cost, the tour groups all had reservation lists stretching out all the way into next year, though more than ten million people had already visited it. And everyone who had been lucky enough to buy spots in those early tours considered it well worth the cost simply from the thrill of riding the elevator up the swaying anchor cable alone. Seeing the inside of the station with their own eyes was just icing on a very expensive cake.

However, the station had become even more crowded with startup companies that immediately leased space on the dwarf planet, thanks to the imminent opening of space to private exploration. Ship showrooms, asteroid mining company offices, logistics company warehouses, and many other types of companies had rushed to pay the high leases with the expectation that the empire would soon be banning civilian spacecraft from entering Earth’s atmosphere.

After all, the entire planet had learned a very painful lesson on 9/11, and that was only further reinforced with the wave of indiscriminate terror attacks carried out only a short while before. Thus, everyone was in favor of that particular piece of expected legislation coming down from the top.

With the increase in companies and individuals leasing space in the new moon, the elevators were in constant motion, carrying freight and people alike from the surface to their new offices in geosynchronous orbit. Not that they could even tell they were in space, that is, as the empire’s gravity plating maintained a constant 1G.

That aside, nobody had time to marvel at the advanced technologies at play—at least not after their very first visit—as they were all too busy preparing for their opening day, when space exploration would finally be something that virtually any person on Earth could partake in. And that day was only a few days away.

Thus, the general busyness of the station had become the norm as thousands of people descended upon the newly refurbished offices, warehouses, space docks, and even the tourist facilities like hotels, bars, casinos, and brothels.

The news of space opening to everyone had even diverted peoples’ attention from the disintegration of the cultists that had taken place mere days before. It was a happy unintentional consequence of the timing of the press release and information dump into the public sector, and had put a rather anticlimactic end to the issues with the cult of the progenitors.

Only a relative few people were still paying attention to matters on the surface: the families and friends of those who were still being held in stasis pending the discovery of a cure for their condition.

Among the victims were two police officers, whose families were staying in hospital lodging, praying to whoever was listening that the empire would soon find a cure for them.

Aron was in his office, watching footage of the people in stasis and their families as he pondered the problem he had taken to calling “mana drain”. Along with that, he was wondering what exactly the last words from the blob of mana meant. Currently, he was about half convinced that it was simply fucking with him as it retreated like a beaten dog.New ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄhapters are published on NoᴠᴇFɪre.nᴇt

The door to his office swooshed open and Nova strode in, piloting her nanite colony body. “Sir, we’ve found a solution to the mana drain issue,” she reported.

“I’m listening,” he replied, resting his chin in his hand and closing the holographic footage he had been watching.

“We need to build medical pods that can deliver a constant stream of unaspected mana to the victims at the same rate they’re losing it, or a little bit faster. Then it’s only a matter of time until their mana bodies heal themselves, and they can be awake in the simulation during the process.”

As she spoke, another virtual screen popped up in front of Aron, showing the results of the testing done in the gold labs of Lab City.

After he finished reading the document, Aron’s gaze grew sharp and he asked, “With that amount of mana, wouldn’t they undergo the same kind of awakening that Rina did?”

“That is a distinct possibility, sir. But I don’t believe that everyone will awaken, even under the same condition as Rina underwent her awakening. The researchers in Lab City believe there’s some aspect of luck to awakening, or perhaps something they simply haven’t discovered yet is interfering with the process.

“But either way, their research and my simulation iterations agree: not everyone will awaken to mana, aspected or not,” Nova explained. “If you turn to page 452 of the research data file, there’s a chart of expected outcomes for the patients undergoing the cure procedure. And ask you can see....”

The conversation between the two lasted for another half hour before Aron asked for silence and sat in thought for quite some time.